<img src="http://www.criticaldance.com/features/2003/images/rosas.jpg" alt="" />A Rosas is a Rosas - an Interview with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker by Donald Hutera

The lyrics quoted [see full article] above are from a song on Joan Baez in Concert, Part II, a classic 1963 recording featuring traditional folk ballads and hymns delivered with crystalline purity by the popular American vocalist/peace activist. This is the musical source of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s solo Once , one of two pieces her company Rosas is presenting in Umbrella 2003. As an extra coup, the Belgian choreographer also dances in each. In Once , clad in a loose, unostentatiously stylish dress, De Keersmaeker occupies a bare stage that is often subject to Rembrandtesque lighting. Her dancing is alert, expressive, sometimes gestural. Her goal seems to be to interpret not the letter but the spirit of Baez’s songs and the tone of the singer’s bell-like, vibratory soprano. At times she mouths silently the lyrics but occasionally the music is cut altogether.

Rosas transformed Sadlers Wells into an arena last night for an in-the-round performance. Choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Cynthia Loemij made their entrance by running through the empty upper levels of the theatre and dashing into the performance space clutching the skirts of their voluminous period costumes which they quickly discarded along with their incongruous red trainers leaving them in thin white shifts.

“Small Hands (out of the lie of no)” is an hour-long duet danced to highly attractive music by Purcell, though unfortunately distorted through the Sadlers Wells sound system. The two women manage to fill the dancing space with the diversity of their sometimes-simplistic movement – just running very fast or skipping happily in time to the music. This is punctuated by periods of silence, almost of reflection, with the dancers becoming more aware of the audience that surrounds them on all sides. And the audience becomes aware of the audience too, because as we watch the dancers we are compelled to observe the variety of our fellow dance fans; the elegantly dressed woman next to the scruffy student next to the man fresh from his office in a business suit, but all watching the dancers with the same intent expressions regardless of their apparent diversity.

The bursts of energy are contrasted with quieter moments. The women dance in unison and apart and as the work progresses and their flimsy garments become more transparent with perspiration one becomes more aware of their very beautiful naked bodies whirling past in such close proximity. During the performance several of the lamps hanging above the stage had slowly descended to the ground and one had come down with an almighty crash. A metaphor for the passing of time? Near the end of the work neon tubes under the seats started to flash randomly between the legs of the spectators enforcing the feeling of audience as backdrop.

Finally the women take off their shifts and, casually indifferent to their nudity, they don more modern attire before briefly resuming their dancing. As with so much of de Keersmaeker’s work you came away with the feeling of having witnessed a real tour de force.

Personally I saw her as naked. I felt this was what was intented, a certain vulnurability in contrast to the images of war projected on her body and the canvas behind her.

De Keersmaeker is an arresting performer, capable of moulding one's emotions with mere flicks of her fingers or a raised eyebrow. The conciseness of some of her gestures had such an impact - I have only seen that managed live to such an extent bythe likes of Marceau.

A show where the dancers are within touching distance of the audience can feel as aggressive as it is intimate. The performers may be opening themselves up to our scrutiny, but they're also testing our nerve. Ordinary reactions become self-conscious when the dancers are centimetres away, especially in Small Hands, where they stand and stare into our eyes, or sit panting at our feet.

Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker avoids the middle ground: she can switch from rigorous formalism to overblown multimedia theatrics. And, following her recent large group works, she has moved to the small scale, bringing a duet and now a solo to London, inspired by her childhood memories of listening to Joan Baez.

The first expression done in silence displayed a particular kind of bodily narrative. Was this a device to allow the audience to look closely at minute details containing head slowly moving side to side, shift of eye balls, down turned month and drift into hip that could signify a number of dispositions including the portrayal of a child day dreaming, whiling the time away. Anne Teresa is a person who in the passage of the dance becomes the body upon which angst and cherished life experiences are witnessed and lived through. The movement text ranges between stillness and explosive gestures portraying desolation, being in a state of lost, a kind of reminiscent longing or an indulgence presented as a laughable distraction. Each movement is a rendition of several songs from Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2. Baez was a folk singer of the 1960’s, a pacifist whose crooning seeped of unbridled affection with abhorrence for killing of any sort for any reason. Baez was political in her pacifistic tendencies fore her songs spoke of the pain caused by mistrust and disillusionment as well as the injustices heaped out by man’s inhumanity to man. Anne Teresa resonates all these varied emotions in an outpouring of movement sequences that mime passages of the songs as well as devise movement metonyms and metaphors portraying an essence of what the song is about or adding an additional comment.

Entering by kicking off her shoes then the first position that is in one place in the space but not totally still, the audience is drawn into this world that can be read from many perspectives giving an individual audience member’s history with each song, their individual experience with dance, their experience with the art of Anne Teresa. The audience snickered during Anne Teresa’s singing of We Shall Overcome. It seemed she turned her head to check the words of the song that were being projected on the brown cyc upstage right. Or did she? Was she being a child not knowing the words to the song or was this a metonym for a society that knew the cost but never quite paid the price for injustices of inequality. I personally was appalled at the giggles. First Anne Teresa’s stance was indicative of those opening gestures, similar to the first stance at the top of this work. There was nothing funny about that stillness and her head gesture from right to left added to the sense of desolation. Also the song. This is a song that black and white people sang during sit-ins and rallies to get equal rights for African Americans. This is a song that people would sing as police beat their heads and torsos before throwing them in the back of vans to be transported to jail. This is a song not to be laughed through no matter what the circumstances. But then not everyone has the same experiences and so those who snickered thought one way while I thought something else. There were many of these political, cultural undercurrents and juxtapositions but there was also those whimsical moments like the lullaby done with rhythm in the feet and hips with different arm, head and voice differences that characterised each animal named in the song or finger gestures that indicated “you” and ”me”. The song When Gods on Your Side had a certain poignancy all its own.

Monotones of black white and beige with the wooden boards that bordered the black lino gave the performance space with the audience seated a close feel. It became even more so when Anne Teresa became naked, aside from a pair of black knickers, changing this world into a very private room. It was a room we had invaded, where the world of hate and killing and lost-ness had invaded and striped this lithe creature of most of her beliefs and challenged her human-ness. Was she a child dancing in her bedroom to a song she liked? Moving downstage left the video projection inscribing the horrors of the civil war on her skin that also cast a shadow on the cyc where the rest of the projected image fell. Anne Teresa dancing the sorrow of Once, a song of a lost sweetheart now become emblematic of the sorrows of war. Standing striped Anne Teresa’s emotions like Baez’s singing is laid bare. Naked except for those black briefs, every move reveals a crease, a twist of skin, wrinkle and tightness, those visible signs of aging and exhaustion, all that has been lived and what has been imagined.

Small Hands (Out of the Lie of No) By David Dougill for The Sunday Times

At Sadler’s Wells for Dance Umbrella, it seemed a perverse and extravagant idea to rearrange the seating for a capacity of less than 400 to display a duet piece by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker for three performances only.

Appreciations and views that I heard about Anne Theresa De Keersmaeker’s eccentricity, strict approach and self-centredness awakened my curiosity and I have decided to come to London to see her dancing. In “The Place“ she showed her first solo “Once“, the masterpiece, as I was told. She was late to appear on the stage. She had barely come when she threw off her shoes. Fortunately, not on the audience…I thought: “She is as she had been described to me“. After that Anne Theresa De Keersmaeker stood still and watched the audience for some five minutes, and we were observing her. Observing to unwind, leave the past, the present and the future behind us and descend the world of her own? She did everything to facilitate this. But, on the other hand, the dancer created the impression that she did not need us, the spectators. She was swinging, twisting, jumping in consonance with Joan Baez words and at times she would sing herself in her tender and clear voice. The simplicity of the words was accompanied by simple movements. Gradually she became part of what she was dancing and singing and she brought me into her world and, I guess, a large part of the audience. I did not retreat from her world it. I did not want to. I discovered that behind this masculine figure, these angular movements resided a female tenderness. The video images o the United States civil war going trough her naked body underlined and fortified this image. I believe after the performance I understood why she is reluctant to come into contact with PR people or journalists. Isn’t it because her dancing is her best way to express her thoughts, feelings, her own world and, finally, the outer world? By Jurate Terleckaite

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